Chapter 505: The Future

Chapter 505: The Future

Yoku’s hand tightened around her mask and Spider watched her, mild curiosity in his expression. He seemed to have absolutely no idea that the thin piece of ceramic wasn’t there to conceal her identity. It was there to make sure no demon mistakenly looked into her eyes.

Any demon that knew who she was — even Belkus himself — would have averted their gaze instantly. Spider didn’t so much as flinch. Either he had absolutely no idea who she was, or he simply didn’t care. Yoku was willing to bet it was the former, and she’d only list a single bet throughout the entirety of her very, very long life.

She lifted the mask away from her face.

Before she could lower it and meet Spider’s gaze unhindered, she paused.

And, for a brief instant, the demon that peered endlessly into the future was plagued by memories of the past.

Old faces flickered in her sightless eyes. Some of them had started to fade with age, but even the relentless millstone of time hadn’t managed to completely wipe them from her memory. They would haunt her for as long as she lived.

There had been a time, so long ago that nearly everyone that still recalled it had long since passed, where Yoku had not possessed the Moonlight Prophecy Master Rune. A time when she had lived with her parents and brother in a small cave in the Wastes.

Yoku only possessed a single clear memory from that time.

The very last one.

She could remember the pain. The burning agony searing through her body as the Master Rune had changed her. As it granted her the gift to witness the potential probabilities of everything before her. As it gave her a looking glass into the future. As it took her eyes in turn.

It had been a cruel joke. A Master Rune that granted vision of the future had an inverse that took her sight of the present. Moonlit Prophecy had burned away her irises and left behind empty portals to the immense might stored within her soul.

If that had been the extent of the rune’s damage, then perhaps she never would have seen it as a curse — but Moonlit Prophecy was far too great a Master Rune to be satisfied with that. The immense weight of every single probable future stored within her hung like the sky itself had been propped up upon rickety stilts.

But Moonlit Prophecy’s passive had taken her sight. It prevented her from looking into the incomprehensible, shifting paths of the future with her own eyes, kept her from being forced to witness the entirety of an ever-growing universe of potential within a split second.

Moonlit Prophecy had taken her eyes to protect her, but it didn’t protect anyone else.

She still remembered the look on her father’s face as his mind had melted. His eyes had gone glassy and flat, shattered windows to an abandoned soul.

She remembered her mother’s scream.

She remembered the panic. The confusion. The terror.

Yoku hadn’t understood what has happening when her father died. She hadn’t known what she had done — but she’d learned. She’d learned when she spun to her mother and brother, only to watch the screams die on their lips as every aspect of them that made them who they were was swept away.

Smokey black tendrils bubbled up from beneath the ground. They rose into the air, invisible to everyone but Yoku, and drove into Spider’s eyes like the fangs of a great beast snapping closed.

And then the incomprehensible weight of Moonlit Prophecy, the Master Rune that had ground the mind and soul every single demon that had ever gazed upon it into mindless mush, crumpled like a scrap of paper.

For the first time in countless years, Yoku felt true terror.

Visions crashed into her mind one after the other. A smiling man standing in a strange, well-lit room surrounded by children holding wooden objects that sang in harmony with strange, melodic voices.

A white bed and white sheets, with arms of pale, pallid skin that matched. The shrill, infuriating beep and screech of odd, metal structures with glowing surfaces covered with strange, incomprehensible runes.

An empty room — and then darkness. Darkness and what laid beyond it. Yoku’s lips parted. Her heart skipped a beat as an icy hand closed around it and started to squeeze.

Glowing bodies in an endless golden line leading through a vast expanse of nothingness. Complete and utter boredom, but more than that. There was nothing but steps.

Footsteps.

Footsteps.

Footsteps.

Footsteps.

Over and over again. Endless boredom. Time stretched and dilated, losing its meaning. It could have been thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. It was impossible to tell.

Incomprehensible pain pierced Yoku’s mind. If she still possessed control of her body, she would have screamed. Instead, she could do nothing but watch the visions drive into her with increasing intensity. Years — decades — centuries — millennia — all passed in the briefest flicker of an instant. She saw nothing but mere flickers of it, but even those were enough.

Moonlit Propehcy held every future that she could see within it, but when Yoku looked into Spider’s eyes, what she found waiting there was eternity. An existence that reached so far back through the universe that even every sprawling future she could conceive was nothing more than a blip before everything that its soul had experienced. It was like weighing a marble against a planet.

And, as blood dripped from Yoku’s nose and trickled from her eyes, she finally understood the future that she had witnessed. She could only weigh futures against herself — and Spider was heavier than she was.

Far, far heavier.

Spider didn’t bend knee to her. He didn’t obey her desires or become a part of her plans. There was only a single future in which she got everything she desired, and that was the one where she became a part of his.